Uncertain Voyage Read online

  Both bitterness and anger passed. What was it Dr. Szym had said so many times? “Life isn’t easy.” But why wasn’t life easy, she wondered despairingly. It had been made easy for her as a child and she had always assumed its ease as an adult. Painting had come easily to her, and with rewards; why couldn’t life?

  She did not comment on his having a wife. She had lately watched far older dreams disintegrate, and with only one last and poignant farewell to what might have been, she adjusted to what was. She was enjoying this man; she would, for the first time in her life, accept her enjoyment of him as an adult, without trying to manipulate or to cling. Why not? She would never see him again, and she had certainly never before met anyone like him. Only children tore up gifts that did not totally please them.

  He had continued talking, and she had not heard him. Now he said, “This looks like your hotel—yes, there’s the sign. Mine is only two blocks away. Shall we meet for a drink in an hour?”

  She suddenly laughed. “I don’t even know your name!”

  He looked chagrined. “Good heavens!” They smiled at each other and he said, delighted, “But this has never happened to me before, it proves how very unimportant names are, doesn’t it? We have talked like this for how long—nearly three hours?—and know each other without any introduction at all. My name is Adam Burrill.”

  “And mine is Melissa Aubrey.”

  “Melissa—I like that.”

  * * *

  —

  “And how do you come to be traveling alone?” he asked an hour later. They were seated in the bar of her hotel with drinks and cigarettes.

  She could speak of Charles now. “My marriage has come to an end,” she said. “You might say as an outcome of therapy. Yes, I guess you really could say that,” she added, surprised by the thought. “Psychiatry really did destroy it. I had to leave.”

  “Because therapy changed you,” he mused.

  She nodded. “Yes. And he couldn’t change, which was the nature of his disease.” She said reflectively, “Change frightens people, you know. It frightens me, but Charles—Charles can’t admit change of any kind into his life. It’s what came near to destroying me, the changeless life we led. Then when I began to change I became a threat to him and he went nearly wild. I had to leave—really—for survival.”

  “Survival of the spirit.” He nodded.

  Again he pleased and surprised her; she had known only literal, material people. “Yes.”

  “Then you are braver than he. Braver than most of us. You are doing what a great many people would like to do but can’t.”

  “Not brave,” she said, shaking her head. “I only remember what it was like to be—” She almost said ill. “What it was like to be buried alive.” For it was surprisingly ironic: her need to avoid aloneness had driven her to Charles, who was so detached from life that he had made her ill enough to be cured.

  “What sort of man is this Charles of yours?” he asked, lighting her a fresh cigarette and leaning forward with real interest.

  She frowned. “He’s intelligent—or started out to be. It’s just that he stopped changing—that word again! I think he collected all of his opinions and beliefs and outlooks before he turned twenty-one; he put them into a satchel and said, ‘There, that’s done’ with a feeling of enormous relief, and for Charles that was that. He was totally formed.”

  Adam nodded. “Yes, that makes a picture.”

  “It has terrible ramifications, of course. There’s no curiosity—it’s dangerous, it might open one to change. It sadly limits your friends, too: they mustn’t ever be curious, or controversial or stimulating or intellectual because they’d become a threat then, your opinions would be challenged and certainly wouldn’t seem so profound. A feeling of superiority has to be maintained at any cost—for protection—and this pretty much limits and strangles every relationship. There’s such maneuvering, you see, to remain admired and looked up to and unchallenged. Above all there has to be a distance kept between you and other human beings so that you’ll never be exposed.” She shrugged. “And with distance how can there be intimacy? It is impossible.”

  Adam shook his head. “It’s difficult to imagine your life. No parties, I suppose.”

  She was shocked. “Good heavens no.”

  “None at all?”

  She shook her head. “Charles didn’t approve of people drinking.” She suddenly burst out laughing. “I’ve just remembered: he complained that what he disliked about drinking was that it changed people.”

  “Good heavens, even there,” said Adam incredulously. “But you have lived a very grim sort of life then. Why on earth did you marry him?”

  She smiled ruefully. “What Charles conceals is his fear of life, and—well, I too am afraid of life.”

  He leaned back. “It’s honest of you to admit.”

  “One learns honesty in therapy.” She said with a sigh, “I suppose I kept hoping he would rescue me from my own fears, that he would help me. What I didn’t understand is that when we marry it’s usually our subconscious that chooses for us. Charles appeared very full of life—he gives that illusion because he is in constant motion—but his incessant motion only conceals the fact that actually his life goes nowhere. I think my subconscious must have shouted, ‘Hooray, the perfect man, marry him and you will always be safe from life because Charles is ten times more afraid than you and this will protect you.’ ” She smiled faintly. “Now at last I understand what happened to me and I pick up the pieces. Except after so many years of atrophy—of no visible signs of life—it’s like never having lived before, like not knowing the rules, not knowing quite what’s—well, real.”

  “But still—better?”

  She said fervently, “It will have to be, it must be. I can’t be like Charles. He lived—how shall I explain it?—in a tightly circumscribed circle of lilliputian dimensions. To step outside of that rigid circle was to experience terrible anxiety and insecurity.” She hesitated. “I have to expose myself now, quite ruthlessly, to those insecurities. Like an inoculation.”

  There was silence and then Adam reached out his hand and covered hers with his. “I’m glad I’ve met you, Melissa Aubrey,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  They reached Tivoli at dusk, and entering its gates walked down a winding path toward the heart of the gardens. “This is a magic place, I feel it,” he said, and reached for her hand and grasped it.

  She smiled, touched by his sharing gesture and only a little frightened by it.

  “Let’s dine here,” he said, pointing to a structure of glass and timber. “I’ll order some very good wines for you to end your years of deprivation.”

  “Just now they feel like centuries of deprivation,” she told him happily.

  “A table for two,” he told the maître d’, and to Melissa, “Have you ever had wienerschnitzel?”

  “Never.”

  “Then you really must try it.” For the next few moments he conferred gravely with both a wine steward and a waiter while Melissa watched with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. Then they were alone again, and with ease the old conversation resumed. “What you’ve said about your marriage interests me,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t love my wife but I would say that we have a good marriage. We live quite separate lives—very stimulating ones for each of us—and see very little of one another but when we meet we have things to talk about.”

  “That sounds—just a little cynical,” she told him, frowning over it.

  He shrugged. “What, after all, is a good marriage? I don’t know of any, really. I sometimes think it is a matter of remaining out of one another’s way.”

  “Now that really is cynical,” she said, laughing.

  He seemed not to hear. “What we talk about is of course quite superficial but—at least we talk. In a good many marriages
there is not even that.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Two people sitting at a table. Watching others. Nothing to say.”

  “I’ve had affairs,” he went on soberly. “A number of them. I’m sure my wife has had them, too. It becomes a pattern, a way of life.”

  She struggled with this concept of marriage. “But aren’t you afraid—that is, isn’t there the danger of—I may sound naïve but what if you should fall deeply in love with one of your women?”

  He smiled sadly. “Oh yes, I’m vulnerable. It’s a hazard, it’s a very real risk. But it’s never happened. I don’t want to leave my wife, you know. If I should, for instance, have an affair with you—I use this only as an example, you understand—I would take from you your warmth, cherishing it, and then go on.”

  She said dryly, “Do you make a public announcement of this each time?”

  “I’m always honest. I try to be.”

  She shook her head. “I think it’s extremely artful. Don’t you think it’s rather like waving a red flag in front of a woman?”

  He looked puzzled. “How do you mean?”

  She smiled. “I mean it’s very clever of you. I’m sure each woman pays no attention at all to what you say, knowing deep down in her bones that she will be the one to make you lose both your head and your wife. She sets out to prove that you’re attainable.”

  He said ruefully, “You have a dismaying knack for making me feel like a cad.”

  “But you are one,” she told him, laughing. “I’ve read of your sort in books.”

  “I cannot impress you at all,” he said with mock helplessness.

  “No, you can’t. That’s the native good sense in me speaking. I do have some, you know, deep down under all my silly problems. Someone like you would be very dangerous to me.” She laughed. “Good heavens—extremely!”

  “Dangerous? How?”

  She stopped laughing, for really it was no joke at all. “Because you would hurt me.”

  “But I would never hurt you.”

  She hesitated. “Yes,” she thought soberly, “you would inflict the greatest hurt of all, for you would fly away and leave me.” And that, she realized, stated her problem very succinctly: that only an unchanging permanence had ever felt safe for her. In a world of flux, of arrivals and departures, she was totally lost, for there was then nothing to hang on to, there were no Absolutes, no guarantees that she mattered. She could not tolerate the anxiety of anything that she might lose. Lacking all certainty within herself she must find it spuriously in other people, seizing and clutching at them until she had bound them to her and placed them in neat rows of coffins, where they were owned, accessible, lifeless—but safe.

  Aloud she said only, “I could be hurt because I have never really loved, either.”

  He looked at her searchingly. “Then yes,” he said softly, “you are vulnerable, too. Extremely so.”

  It was an unexpected moment. She stared at him, unable to speak; he had looked inside of her, he had seen. She felt in his words an acknowledgment of herself as a person and was strangely moved by it. Only Dr. Szym had ever looked within her; no one else. Yes, you are vulnerable, too. The compassion of it brought tears to her eyes and she had to look down and pretend to be busy with her demitasse. At last, very lightly, she said, “It must be shockingly late.”

  He glanced at his watch and smiled. “So late that it is now intermission time. Shall we try for the second half?”

  “Why not?”

  “I feel I’ve not talked so much in years.” He gestured to the waiter, paid the bill and they left.

  Outside it had grown dark, turning Tivoli Garden into a land of enchantment. Lights bloomed everywhere like flowers: filigreed lanterns, round globes of pale gold and white and pink, discs of blue and deep violet, lights and shapes of such whimsy and delight as Melissa had never seen before. “Oh, look—Adam, look,” she gasped, stopping. Ahead of them, framed against the dark sky, stood a huge, ancient oak tree dressed with an embroidery of twinkling stars: not a Christmas tree but a fairyland tree. Clusters of tiny white lights had been hung at intervals all through the tree’s branches, and as the night wind filled the leaves it set every star to dancing. “But it’s unbelievable,” she whispered, feeling the beauty of it clutch at her heart, and as she gazed, filling her eyes with it, beauty rooted her to this moment in Time as securely as this tree had rooted itself in centuries of earth.

  The moment passed, and she became herself again, mortal, yet not quite the same because she had been moved and touched by beauty.

  * * *

  —

  When they emerged from the theater the lights were slowly being extinguished in the park. It was already the morning of another day and Melissa sighed with the realization that it was ending, it was over. “My tree is dark,” she said, pointing to the huge tree empty now of lights.

  “The Danes know how to live,” he mused, looking up into the mysterious dark foliage of the tree.

  Dreamily she said, “That’s a rash statement, you know, they have a rather high suicide rate.”

  “Do they really! I wonder why.”

  “Actually I can tell you,” she said with a smile in her voice. “I told you that I have spent my life reading, not living, and before I left home I came across something about the Danes. It seems that as a race they have the same problems I have.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm. Very strong dependency needs, with suicidal tendencies when their dependencies vanish. It’s the way they’re punished as children. With guilt.”

  “But aren’t most of us punished in that way?” he mused.

  “Yes, but there’s a double bind involved. They’re denied any outlet for hostility after they’ve been made to feel the guilt. It was pointed out, for instance, how different their fairy tales are from those of other European countries. Other fairy tales have evil and terror and wicked witches in them but not the Danish stories, they’re all sweetness and forgiveness and a giving up for others. So aggressiveness is repressed, they’re unable to acknowledge their frustration, and they grow up crooked.”

  “To build beautiful gardens like this which are the very antithesis of evil and doubt.”

  She thought, “Oh if only I’d been able to talk like this to Charles!” She laughed suddenly. “But perhaps it’s better just to admire a fairyland and not look behind the façade. I do like Tivoli.”

  “And so do I,” he said. “Now what shall we do tomorrow?”

  His words caught her unaware and she felt a quickening of warmth. So this was to go on…She realized that for the first time in her life it had not occurred to her whether she was to see this man again. She had become totally absorbed in each moment, savoring every nuance and odd turning that it took, being completely herself without pretense or maneuvering or guile. And now it was to go on…

  “The tourist book has a long list,” she said quickly, to conceal her pleasure. “The Changing of the Guard at the Palace, the Tuborg beer factory, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “The et ceteras sound especially interesting,” he said with a smile. “Suppose we meet at ten outside your hotel.” They entered the lobby, quiet and dim at this hour. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase and released her hand. “Until ten,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Shall we continue these soul-searchings tomorrow?”

  “Agreed,” she said, smiling at him. “Until ten then.” With the dignity of someone who feels of infinite value she ascended the stairs but at the landing she stopped, a sense of wonder spreading through her, for she had just recalled the Melissa who sat in a museum park and promised herself the safety of a quiet evening, a long bath, and a new book. Delight filled her, and standing there alone on the landing thousands of miles from home, Melissa threw back her head and laughed with joy.

  4

  They met at ten o’clock, softly, eagerly.
Was it time or sleep that had changed them, wondered Melissa, and she decided, being new to life, that relationships of any value must grow even during hours of separation to make the next encounter so astonishing. She saw Adam walking toward her and felt not only anticipation but a sense of familiarity such as she would feel toward someone known for a very long time. And her anticipation was keen: she was aware that yesterday had been only an introduction, a clearing-away of detail; for if a friendship or an intimacy was, like therapy, a matter of layers—and both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self—then only the outermost layers had been peeled away yesterday, with more to come today.

  In turn she survived Adam’s curious and searching glance. Coming to a stop before him she said, “Good morning!”

  He neither smiled nor spoke but tucked her arm under his in unspoken acknowledgment, and they began to walk toward the Bredgade. “You’ve breakfasted?” he asked at last.

  “Sumptuously.”

  “Good. I propose that we have a late lunch at that very charming outdoor restaurant in Tivoli Garden, the one beside the lake with the swans. In the meantime, what shall we do with this bright, charming morning?”

  They caught a tram to the State Museum and spent the next hours exploring its art treasures, except that for Melissa it was more of an experience than a tour because of Adam’s encyclopedic knowledge of art. Nothing had escaped his interested eye, his taste was catholic and unlimited, and despite a moderately adequate training, Melissa was overwhelmed by the gaps in her knowledge and reduced to the status of a student. They talked, discussed, and argued—“how dare you know so much?” she demanded hotly; “But I am the complete dilettante,” he replied, “I know all and create nothing”—until at last, drained but satisfied, they walked out into the sunlight.